The narrator never speaks or writes as an individual, never uses the pronoun “I,” always speaks as “we.” As representative of the townspeople, the narrator feels a compulsion to tell the story of a woman who represents something important to the community. Black voices are excluded from this collective voice as it speaks out of old and new generations. Colonel Sartoris’s antebellum generation is succeeded by one with “modern ideas”: “Thus, she passed from generation to generation.